stephen_g

What I’m trying to say is that with 7 slots and being more than double the size that it needed to be, it was way more machine than 95% of the market who might actually want it would buy, with a price that was correspondingly way too expensive…

I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple should have worked out what professionals actually want - basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a few SSD slots. That’s literally all it should be!

The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to expensive…

That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.

Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.

The cable in the article is pretty much doing the same conflation of terms that Wiki is talking about - the automotive one is a proprietary cable that carries some protocol that uses LVDS as its signalling, so at the most basic level both it and the display cable in the laptop are 'LVDS cables' but that's also the most generic term that gives you no information about the protocol actually being carried by the cables.

Your picture is not an accurate picture of what it's like for most people - you frame the exceptions as if it's the normal case.

Most people who have a driveway or garage where they can install an EVSE (or an apartment complex where the parking has chargers) don't even need to charge every day. Depending on the commute it could even be just two or three times a week. It would usually only be when your only option is trickle charging out of a standard wall outlet that you are in the 'might not be able to charge in time for the next drive' territory, not with EVSE where you can get 7 kW single phase or 11 kW three-phase with most cars (some cars can do up to 22 kW with three phase but that's rare for them to support that on AC charging and it would be rare to have an EVSE that could do that power at home).

Sounds like when there was that news of "Europe is creating a social media website called 'W' to compete with X" and it just turned out it was some random tiny company.

I can see that happening in Australia, our tax office can be absolutely brutal on all but the big companies that can afford really good lawyers.

This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’.

And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…

I see this a lot too here in Australia now, and yes it used to be pretty unusual but now I see it every day. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a frequency illusion but I'm sure it has got much worse, maybe since the COVID times?

> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun

I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?

Title is inaccurate, it's really designed to be about the size of a USB-C receptacle , the plug is the other side (in this case the part of the cable that plugs in to this board)

We are vulnerable in Australia though because we have to move food large distances from farms to cities and are unusually road-dependent for those kind of distances (most countries use much more freight rail). Large diesel price rises are going to be extremely painful for us.

And electricity and manufacturing too, since we have no real gas reservation policy and the exporters were allowed to build enough capacity to export basically every single joule of gas that we produce (and they pay a fraction of the royalties that countries like Qatar rake in). So locals and local businesses pay very high prices so the gas companies can export most of our supply overseas...

Isn’t that cross-linked polyethylene (PEX), not PP?

If you're not selling them then there isn't really any certification requirements until you start to get into the mains voltages. This all seems to be 12/24V DC stuff on the battery side and 60V DC on the solar side which comes under 'extra-low voltage' in basically every jurisdiction which is usually not really regulated because it's difficult to shock someone.

The battery stuff is more risky (bringing lithium cells into the picture) but I don't think anyone should be worried by the MPPTs.

The cheap stuff usually have the certification labels printed on them, but a cursory look inside usually shows breaches if you know what to look for (like we have had stuff from China where the ground wire wasn't connected to anything, but even if that's right there are things like just not having enough clearance between mains and isolated DC in power supplies etc.). So they are definitely not actually certified, they just slap the labels on anyway.

Of course, there is a rising group of actually really high-quality native brands starting to come out of China - Anker were an early one of these, Xiaomi is a massive one, UGreen is really popular on Amazon etc. These kind of brands actually will be properly certified and are scary good for how cheap they are. So it's changing a lot.

In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from my experience, having always known and used Celsius. Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally just about growing up with it.

Nah it’s massive overkill - much bigger and bulkier than it needs to be for mostly historical reasons. I’d take it over the US’s plug and socket but that's not saying much - there are plenty of better ones than either!

Yeah I'm not saying they are unheard of - for example I've done a lot of stuff in AV and almost every single extension cord you use in that world will be a piggy-back right angle (always moulded though because they have to be test-and-tagged so a reputable certifier won't pass them).

Just that not having any pictures of the plug that you see on 90% of cords in normal use is an odd choice.

I feel like that's definitely a choice for Facebook at least - there's no technical reason the app couldn't remember at least the post you were looking at. I think they literally don't care if you were halfway through reading something when you flicked out of the app and go back in - refreshing the page and showing you all new stuff is probably measurably "better for 'engagement'" by whatever silly metrics they use.

I think it's overrated, plenty of equipment has some kind of protection internally anyway.

My country has never had a fuse in the plug and we generally have a very safe electrical system (much stricter earthing rules than the US for example). Adding an extra fuse doesn't really seem to add much, it really doesn't seem to be any kind of significant risk.

The Australian examples are very odd - the pictures of our general purpose outlets are normal (figures 1 and 3 when you click on Australia), but most of the rest is unusual and either fairly or very rare.

For example the plug shown on the main page is very non-typical - it's a re-wireable one which you very rarely see (because it's generally only if a plug has been damaged and had to be replaced) - almost all the plugs normal people will ever use in Australia will actually be fully moulded.

Secondly it's right-angle, which is not incredibly rare but not the default - normally you'd only see that on some power-boards (what the US I think calls 'power strips') or some extension cables. Appliances usually have straight plugs, the right angle one you do see on them sometimes but not as much (maybe 5-10%).

When you click in to the Australia page, the back side of the plug is also shown as piggy-back which is also quite rare (usually only on extension cords - such as in figure 10, that one is fairly normal).

Figures 5, 6, 7 and 8 and 9 are also things you'll almost never see (it does say in the case of figure 9 that a rewirable piggy-back as shown is now disallowed by our wiring standards).

Some of the example pictures would be better to be changed to something more normal, and the detailed page could probably be broken up into typical, specialist and rare/obsolete sections because it's confusing having it all together.

Yes the normal term I’ve always heard and used for what they’re talking about is “BOM cost”, i.e. the combined cost of every item on the BOM to make a single unit.

Yeah, main issue with Swift is that the c++ interop (which was absolutely bleeding-edge) still isn't to the point of being able to pull in parts of the Ladybird codebase.

If I recall correctly, part of this was around classes they had that replaced parts of the STL, whereas the Swift C++ interop makes assumptions about things with certain standard names.

No they don’t - SerenityOS did, but when Ladybird split out they started using all sorts of third party libraries for image decoding, network, etc.

Now a core part of the browser rendering engine is not something they’re going to outsource because it would defeat the goal of the project, but they have a far different policy to dependencies now than it used to before.

Yes I noticed that too, and clicking on Austria takes you to Australia instead! (AU instead of AT which is Austria's country code)

Then when you actually are in Australia, if you click back to 2001 or earlier it changes to 'Ashmore and Cartier Islands'

Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more.

I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.

It’s horrible to work with - dangerous, embrittlement issues etc., and very energy intensive to compress into very heavy cryogenic storage containers…

There was some beef the site owner had with Cloudflare where if your were using Cloudflare DNS it wouldn’t serve anything to you? Is that still happening?

Not sure why it would only be on archive.is and not the others but ‘is’ loads for me.

I expect that to go about as well as Facebook changing their name to Meta and putting all their eggs in the Metaverse/VR basket...

But at least Meta's legacy businesses (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) were still valuable enough to fall back on - whereas Tesla's seems to be tanking. Only their utility-scale fixed battery business seems to have much potential if they can't turn around their dwindling car business.

I'm not American (I'm Australian), but until Tesla divests from Elon Musk, chances are the next car I buy will be Chinese...